State Department Shoots Itself in the Foot at Impeachment Hearings

The State Department, where I worked 24 years as a Foreign Service Officer (FSO) and diplomat, reminds me a lot of my current hometown, New York City. Both places spend an inordinate amount of time telling outsiders how great they are while ignoring the obvious garbage piled up around them. It’s almost as if they’re trying to tell themselves more than others everything is OK.

Like NYC convincing itself the Broadway lights mean you won’t notice the wicked homeless problem and decaying infrastructure, the State Department fully misunderstands how it really appears to others. Across Facebook groups and internal channels, FSOs this week are sending each other little messages tagged #FSProud quoting Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s the closing soliloquy from her impeachment testimony. Yovanovitch’s testimony otherwise read like the HR complaint from hell, as if she was auditioning for a Disgruntled Employee poster child position to cap off her career. She had already been fired by the time the alleged impeachable act took place — during Trump’s July 25 phone call — and was stuck in a placeholder job far removed from Ukrainian policy. She witnessed nothing of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” the House is investigating, and basically used her time to complain she knew more than her boss did so he fired her.

At the end of her testimony Yovanovitch unfurled a large metaphorical flag and wrapped herself and the entire Foreign Service in it. Her lines had nothing to do with Ukraine, and were boilerplate recruiting prose about how FSOs are non-partisan servants of the Constitution, how everyone lives in harm’s way, yada yada. She name checked diplomats from forty freaking years ago held hostage in Iran, and rolled in a couple of CIA contractors when tallying up the “State” death toll in Benghazi. She omitted the we-don’t-talk-about-that-one-death of FSO Anne Smedinghoff in Afghanistan, whose 25-year-old life was destroyed participating in a propaganda photo-op.

This is the false idol image the State Department holds dear of itself, and people inside the organization today proudly christened Ambassador Yovanovitch as its queen. Vanity Fair summed it up better than the long-winded FSOs bleating across social media: “A hero is born as Yovanovitch gives voice to widespread rage at State. ‘I think people are feeling huge pride in Masha,’ says a former ambassador.” Yovanovitch uses her Russian nickname, Masha, without media comment because of course she does.

And that’s the good part. Alongside Yovanovitch, bureaucrat-in-a-bow-tie George Kent issued pronouncements against Trump people he never met who ignored his tweedy advice. Ambassador Bill Taylor leaked hoarded text messages with Trump political appointees. Taylor’s deputy, David Holmes, appeared deus ex machina (Holmes had a photo of Yovanovitch as his Facebook page cover photo until recently!) to claim back in the summer he somehow overheard both sides of a phone conversation between Trump and political appointee ambassador Sondland. Holmes eavesdropped on a presidential call and dumped it in the Democrats’ lap and now he’s non-partisan #FSProud, too.

Interesting the major political events (scandals?) of the last few years have all criss-crossed the State Department: Clinton’s emails and Foundation shenanigans, the Steele Dossier and many things Russiagate, and now impeachment and Ukraine. And never mind two major Democratic presidential candidates-in-waiting, Clinton and Kerry, had a home there. That’s an awful lot of partisanship for an organization bragging about being non-partisan.

Gawd, I need to wash my hands. I am #FSProud that in my 24 years as a diplomat I never perjured myself, or claimed to or actually eavesdropped on someone else’s phone call, then spoon fed the info months later to my boss on TV to take down a president mid-campaign, all the while accepting cheers that I was non-partisan, and thinking my role as a snitch/boot licker was going to help people vision my organization as honorable.

FSOs see themselves as Marvel superheroes who will take down the Bad Orange Man. The organization flirted with the role before; a 2016 mid-election “dissent” was designed to force the winner into war in Syria. Then another “dissent” by State strayed close to insubordination opposing Trump’s so-called “Muslim Ban.” Everyone remembers the Department’s slow-walking the release of Hillary Clinton’s emails (after helping hide the existence of her private server for years.) The State Department turned a blind eye to Secretary Clinton’s nepotism hiring her campaign aides as State employees (remember Huma?), and use of America’s oldest cabinet position to create B-roll of herself helping women around the globe ahead of her soiled campaign. Hillary of course was handed the Secretary job itself by Barack Obama as a treat for dropping out of the race in 2008.

Maybe the State Department’s overt support for Candidate Clinton did not make clear enough what happens when the organization betrays itself to politics.

While FSOs are gleefully allowing themselves to be used today to impeach Trump, they fail to remember nobody likes a snitch. No matter which side you are on, in the end nobody will trust you, Democrat or Republican, after seeing what you really are. What White House staffer of any party will interact openly with his diplomats, knowing they are saving his texts and listening in on his calls, waiting? State thinks it is a pitbull waiting to bite on its master’s command when in fact it is an organization that has betrayed its golden nonpartisan glow and is out of control. Hey, in your high school, did anyone want to have the kids who lived to be hall monitors and teacher’s pet as their lunch buddies?

The real problems go much deeper, and are either the cause of or a reflection of the current state of things, or a little of both. A Government Accountability Office report showed more than one fourth of all Foreign Service positions were either unfilled or filled with below-grade employees. At the senior levels 36 percent of positions were vacant or filled with people of lower rank and experience pressed into service. At the crucial midranks, the number was 26 percent unfilled.

The thing is the report is from 2012, and showed similar results to one written in 2008. The State Department has danced with irrelevancy for a long time and its efforts to be The Resistance as a cure today feel more like desperation than heroism. State’s somnolent response, even during the legendary Clinton and Kerry years, to what should have been a crisis call (speculate on what the response might be to a report the military was understaffed by 36 percent) tells the tale. As the world changes, State still has roughly the same number of Portuguese speakers as it does Russian among its FSOs. No other Western country uses private citizens as ambassadors over career diplomats anywhere near the extent the United States does, doling out about a third of the posts as political patronage mainly because what they do doesn’t matter. The Secretary of State hands out lapel buttons reading “Swagger“; imagine a new Secretary of Defense doing the same and then being laughed out of office.

FSOs wade in the shallowest waters of the Deep State. Since the 1950s the heavy lifting of foreign policy, the stuff that ends up in history books, mostly moved into the White House and National Security Council. The increasing role of the military in America’s foreign relations further sidelined State. The regional sweep of the AFRICOM and CENTCOM generals, for example, paints State’s landlocked ambassadors weak.

State’s sad little attempt during the Bush years to stake out a new role in nation building failed in Iraq, failed in Afghanistan, and failed in Haiti. The organization’s Clinton-Kerry era joblet promoting democracy through social media was a flop. Trade policy has its own bureaucracy outside Foggy Bottom. What was left for State was reporting, its on-the-ground viewpoint that informs policy makers. Even there the intelligence community has eaten State’s sandwiches with the crusts cut off lunch — why hear what some FSO thinks the Prime Minister will do when the NSA can provide the White House with real time audio of him explaining it in bed to his mistress? The uber revelation from the 2010 Wikileaks dump of documents was most of State’s vaunted reporting is of little practical value. State struggled through the Chelsea Manning trial to convince someone actual harm was done to national security by the disclosures. Some nine years later there hasn’t even been a good book written from them.

That leaves for the understaffed Department of State pretty much only the role of concierge abroad, the one Ambassadors Taylor, Yovanovitch and their lickspittles Kent and Holmes complained about as their real point during the impeachment hearings. Read their testimony and you learn they had no contact with principals Trump, Giuliani, and Pompeo (which is why they were useless “witnesses,” they didn’t see anything first hand) and bleated about being cut out of the loop, left off calls, not being on the inside. They testified instead based on overheard calls and off screen voices. Taylor complained he had to contact the NSC, not State, to find out if policy had changed, and whined Pompeo ignored his reports.

Meanwhile, America’s VIPs need their hands held abroad, their motorcades organized, and their receptions handled, all tasks that fall squarely on the Department of State. That is what was really being said underneath it all at the impeachment hearings. It is old news, but it found a greedy audience as it was repurposed to take a whack at Trump. State thinks this is its moment to shine, but all that is happening is a light is being shined on the organization’s partisaness and pettiness in reaction to its own irrelevance.

Nice bow tie on George Kent though, shows he’s “with it.”

BONUS:

One of The Blob’s greatest accomplishments has been to convince a large number of Americans everything pre-Trump was normal and everything since is extraordinary. That sets up the idea that extraordinary means are needed to deal with unique threats, and that sets up throwing away the rules because when the Republic is at stake ends justify the means.

No one here is claiming any virtue for Trump. He is a bad president. But he is not uniquely bad such that he is a threat to democracy, etc. That is a myth which is used to justify things that can become threats to the democracy.

Dems want to impeach over… not much because not much is what they have. Ukraine really is not important. Most of us never heard the names outside of Foggy Bottom of the State Dept people now raised to heroic status. But if this process is normalized then it will come back again, against a president “you” do like.

This article is dedicated to New York theater critic John Simon, who passed today.

Simon: “It is wonderful to be hated by idiots, as the world is full of idiots and they’re in control of everything. You fool, stay alive to annoy them!’ And that, in a sense, is my function in life, and my consolation. If I can’t convince these imbeciles of anything, I can at least annoy them, and I think I do a reasonably good job of that.”

Not you too, Peter – the tiresome disclaimers about how bad the Orange Man is. You may think that you need to issue these, but you don’t. Anyone with any honesty knows where you’re coming from, and the rest don’t matter.

Sort of connected. Barack Obama recently lectured his party’s faithful and told everyone they needed to chill out and just get behind whoever became the chosen candidate. He doesn’t want to endorse anyone who might lose the primary and horrors lose the general for it might tarnish his legacy. What if the Democrats come up with a Trump of their own? (I can think of a few). What then Mr. Obama?

To be fair, the State Department does actually do some things for the USA:

1. The Consular Corps works its butt off taking care of US citizens abroad and foreign citizens who want to come to the US, all while (incredibly but true enough) paying for itself.

2. US Embassies abroad serve as very important platforms for other US Government agencies who want to do real work.

3. The Concierges at US Embassies help real decision makers get their jobs done, and also assist their spouses with their sightseeing and shopping plans. (A happy decision maker is an effective decision maker!)

But yeah, other than the Consular and Management Officers, many FSOs tend to be intelligent, educated and arrogant, so lazy they couldn’t make it in academia and also so clueless they can’t conceptualize how meaningless their diplomatic titles have become. As an example of the latter, I actually had the pleasure of sitting in on a “Country Team” meeting to plan a Secretary of State (SecState) visit to Asscrackistan. At that meeting an FSO balked at the idea of the SecState not allowing the Ambassador to ride in the SecState’s limousine (which was actually just the Ambassador’s commandeered limo!) The justification? That per “protocol” the Ambassador, as the President’s representative, actually outranked the SecState! Even if true, you can imagine how well that rather dimwitted argument went over. (Hint: about as well as being some jackass today who still wears a bowtie to an important appearance.)

It sounds like Ambassador “Masha” is yet another of these leeches, though in her case she’s traded the whole “I am the President’s representative!” nonsense for “I am a Patriot!” because she doesn’t like the guy she swore to work for.

The only real thing that keeps the State Department afloat is that the Secretary of State position is now the de facto US Ambassador at large to the world. Essentially the President’s representative to everyone he can’t get around to, a plum job for failed Presidential candidates/sort of political allies and maybe (i.e. back in the days of Powell) someone who’d occasionally give a rats ass about actually running the agency they were the head of.

“Swagger?” Really??? ROFLMAO. How about actually staffing the supposed Cabinet level agency you’re swaggering around in? What a joke.

Joe: A career ambassador such as Yavonovitch is lauded for her sterling public service as if she has sacrificed a normal life that we the public take for granted and also to make her words more priestly and authoritative. I doubt she serves my interests but that isn’t the point-she serves the POTUS’s interests. She held her nose while pretending to serve TRUMP and he noticed. An opinion of course.

While FSOs are gleefully allowing themselves to be used today to impeach Trump, they fail to remember nobody likes a snitch. No matter which side you are on, in the end nobody will trust you, Democrat or Republican, after seeing what you really are. What White House staffer of any party will interact openly with his diplomats, knowing they are saving his texts and listening in on his calls, waiting? State thinks it is a pitbull waiting to bite on its master’s command when in fact it is an organization that has betrayed its golden nonpartisan glow and is out of control. Hey, in your high school, did anyone want to have the kids who lived to be hall monitors and teacher’s pet as their lunch buddies?

The MSM is critical of Repugnicans as not really caring about the threat a country that Repugnicans use to justify endless pay raises to the MIC. What the MSM fails to understand is Repugnicans are fighting a battle for its survival that invasion of brown people threatens them more than the Evil Empire.

The Deep State Witch Hunts claim two more patriots as Repugnicans Hunter and Collins are forced to plead guilty on trumped up charges.Collins and Hunter are not the first nor the last.

The Deep State has to be stopped before it destroys more Repugnican patriots. Please send your donations to Repugnican chairman in exile Paul Manafort, care of Billy the Toad Barr. You will receive a turkey with stuffing cooked by Mike the Russian Chef Flynn. Mike Pompeo will send you a tape for your entertainment of his famous impersonation of Ned Beatty in Deliverance.

You must give now to support these patriots who represent you. They may be crooks, but they are your crooks, and deep state down you know they are as corrupt as you.

The Repugnicans are shooting themselves in the foot…and digging their own Graves.

Repugnican Congressman Graves is headed for an afterlife.

While President Donald Trump handily won Graves’ district in 2016, the congressman snubbed the now-president as Trump aspired to become the Republican Party’s nominee.

“I have trouble seeing how he lines up with the great tradition of Lincoln and Reagan, and I’m concerned that many of his statements run afoul of the Constitution, my values and my beliefs,” Graves said in a letter to his supporters during the Georgia Republican presidential primary in 2016.

“Then there’s a simpler test: would I be comfortable if my three children acted like Trump? Certainly not.”